Here’s What Google’s New Terms & Conditions Mean For Users

The revised set of guidelines have been notified to the users and come into from 31 March onwards.

The details have been shared with users over mail in the past few weeks.

(Photo: Google policy website)

Google’s new terms and conditions come into effect from 31 March onwards and the company has been alerting its users about the changes by mailing them its details.

As per the policies published, there are total of four changes being made, which claims to improve readability and communication for the user (in terms of the language).

In addition to this, Google is also bringing its other products like Drive and Chrome into the ambit but don’t expect any changes to its privacy policies. All these are unlikely to make a big difference to the end users.

“We’re updating our Terms of Service. Get to know our new Terms before they take effect on 31 March 2020,” Google mentioned in its alert to millions of users.

These revisions are likely to have been brought about after multiple data incidents that Google has reported over the past few years and EU grilling the company over these mishaps.

“ These changes reflect an evolving regulatory environment and also our ongoing efforts to simplify how we communicate with users,” Google has highlighted the need for these changes.

Changes in Google’s Terms and Conditions

1. Improved readability: While our terms remain a legal document, we’ve done our best to make them easier to understand, including by adding links to useful information and providing definitions.
2. Better communication: We’ve clearly explained when we’ll make changes to our services (like adding or removing a feature) and when we’ll restrict or end a user’s access. And we’ll do more to notify you when a change negatively impacts your experience on our services.
3. Adding Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS and Google Drive to the Terms: Our improved terms now cover Google Chrome, Google Chrome OS, and Google Drive, which also have service-specific terms and policies to help you understand what’s unique to those services.
4. No changes to our Privacy Policy: We’re not making any changes to the Google Privacy Policy and we haven’t made any changes to the way we treat your information. As a reminder, you can always visit your Google Account to review your privacy settings and manage how your data is used.

What About Your Privacy?

Google says it is not making any changes to privacy policies, but it is giving users the choice to monitor the amount of data accumulated by the company and remove things if necessary.

Interestingly, Google is giving people the chance to not accept these terms and conditions, and stop using any of its platforms. “ If you don’t agree to the new terms, you should remove your content and stop using the services,” Google mentioned here.